You said: "Regardless of what someone arbitrarily declares a "living wage" to be does not mean that those people produce enough to justify such a wage."
What a bunch of CRAP. These workers ARE the people cranking out thousands of pairs of shoes that retail for over 100 dollars a pair that makes Nike BILLIONS of dollars and they can't afford to pay those workers FOUR DOLLARS A DAY!!??? Aren't you ashamed to look at yourself in the mirror in the morning after saying such self serving LIES?
Yes far better for a few to have unimaginable luxury so that even MORE people can starve. ASSHOLE!!!!
Although I tend towards anarchism people like you make me wonder if if maybe socialism IS a good idea. The more people we can keep from starving by getting them resources (yes including information leading to self sufficiency) the better. Total self centered greed is neither moral nor admirable, nor even sustainable, for it leads to decadence. Does Rome ring a bell?
So you you are justifying exploiting the fuck out of people because they live in very desperate circumstances? ASSHOLE!!!!!! And you wonder why Latin American countries are electing leftist leaders and saying FUCK YOU to use multinationals exploiting their populations?
Excellent idea, living in non sustainable environments sucks. Now where are we putting these people EXACTLY? Are you volunteering your backyard? I hope you have a big backyard...
If you are stranded on a desert Island with no clean water, no cooking utensils, and say no fish or birds, or animals for protein you'll be hurting even if you have a dual processor notebook, that boots OS X, Windows, and Linux. THAT's my point. Once you are doing a little better and aren't starving, and have a few tools to work with and a community behind you then yes of course information is useful for self sufficiency, but first things first...
I too lived in Oregon in Deadwood between Eugene and Florence about 50 miles from the coast. Where I was there WERE a large number of people living in trailers and shacks. And yes Oregon is more generous than most places with things like many food banks, state provided health insurence (is that still true?), etc. My point is that there are MILLIONS of people in the rural U.S. who could use access to a cheap laptop to further their education.
Sorry if "inland Oregon" offended you, it was the first phrase that popped into my mind and not ment to be a slur (shrug).
Yeah "foreign investment" sure helped those people in Vietnam and Indonesia working at Nike factories for less than 40 dollars a month:
"By 1997, Nike was shamed into telling its Indonesian contractors to stop asking for exemptions to the minimum wage and to stop paying apprentice wages. But the company still does not require its contractors to pay workers a living wage. In April 1999 when the Indonesian government announced that it was increasing the minimum wage to 231,000 rupiah/month ($26US), Nike for the first time announced that it would raise wages for its Indonesian factory workers higher than the legally required minimum,. Their new wage was a minimum cash wage of 265,000 ($30US) and a bonus package that adds up to 332,000 ($37.50US).
While this is certainly a step forward, the wages are still a far cry from a living wage. An Indonesian wage study released by Global Exchange shows that 332,000 rupiah/month ($37.50US) is needed to cover the basic needs of one person. A living wage, which is a wage that helps cover the needs of a family, not just one worker, would be twice this figure, or 664,000 rupiah/month ($75US).
Moreover, Vietnamese and Chinese workers still get poverty wages. In all three countries, $4 a day would be considered a decent wage. Nike, a company with $8.7 billion in revenue in 1998 that sells its shoes for $150, can well afford to pay its workers such a meager sum.
Moreover, Vietnamese and Chinese workers still get poverty wages. In all three countries, $4 a day would be considered a decent wage. Nike, a company with $8.7 billion in revenue in 1998 that sells its shoes for $150, can well afford to pay its workers such a meager sum."
Yes living expenses are less in third world countries but not THAT much less. Cheap labor conservatives love "foreign investment" when the the prevailing wage in the country being invested in is a slave level of wage. If we are actually concerned with helping people and not exploiting them, we should aim for them becoming self sufficient through education, and micro businesses, not being exploited by first world multinationals. And yes laptops might be PART of that picture, FIRST people need to be healthy through building basic infrastructure like clean water, good agricultural practices, etc. THEN in the long term they can build up educational opportunities so they no longer need to be dependent on foreign aid. But first things first don't put the cart before the horse, and don't look at people as a source of cheap labor to be exploited.
My point is that there are people in the rural U.S. who need educational help as well, and our infrastructure even in these poor areas is better set up to make good use of cheap laptops.
For example according to: worldhungeryear.org
"Poverty in Rural America: Special Challenges Facing Rural Communities
Rural America comprises over 2052 counties, contains 75% of the nation's land and is home to 17% (49 million) of the US population (USDA Economic Research Service). 11.6% or 2.4 million households experience hunger (Bread for the World 2004 Hunger Report). 3.8% American households have children living with hunger (USDA), while one out of five rural children are reported to live in poverty (Population Reference Bureau). At the same time the rural elderly face escalating rates of poverty. Rural workers have been statistically proven to earn less money and experience higher rates of poverty and unemployment than their metro counterparts. in a food insecure household (USDA), while three out of five rural children are reported to live in poverty (US Census 2000). At the same time the rural elderly face escalating rates of poverty. Rural workers have been statistically proven to earn less money and experience higher rates of poverty and unemployment than their metro counterparts."
I'd say these people are far better candidates for a 100 dollar laptop than a sub Saharan Africa village, that needs war pumps, water filters, birth control, basic medicines, and help with agriculture, before they can start even THINKING about cheap lap tops.
I think they can have both in the long term. In the short term you have to be not not starving and suffering from dysentery to get any use from the laptop.
Of course, I'm just saying lets make sure people AREN'T starving FIRST before we start shipping over laptops. I'm also saying there are people right here at home (for those of us posting from the U.S.) who could use this help and probably have better infrastructure to support it than MANY (though not all) places in the third world.
Retail price 150 bucks and you can bet BOTH c=Circuit City and Apple are making healthy markups, I'd be genuinely surprised if the nano costs more than 80 bucks to make.
People starving in Africa don't need laptops, they need basic infrastructure like clean water. Where this might be useful though is parts of highly impoverished rural America like parts of say Alabama, West Virginia, inland Oregon, etc. These are areas where people are genuinely strapped for cash and a 100 dollar good to go laptop might be genuinely useful, most particularly for kids in school, being portable. Yes the geeks among the rural population might be able to build a better computer cheaper, but lets be realistic that's what maybe 10% of the population?
Don't think there aren't areas in the U.S. that don't look like the 3rd world with shacks, and trailer homes, there are, I've lived there and those people need help too.
Excellent point Truman's setting up the CIA, NSA, FBI, was a big breaking point in the American republic, ironically enough I just e-mailed that same point to a friend of mine. I guess my point was that the Republicans specifically started a deep slide into a police state mentality in the 80s, but you are right the rot has much earlier origins, origins Eisenhower tried to warn us about in his last speech about the military industrial complex. At this point pinning our hopes on either the Ds, or Rs is just plain futile.
I hate to break it to you but the last small republic Republicans died out with Goldwater in the 70s. Ever since the Reagan (proto neo-con) era the Republicans have represented big governments (deficits increased under Reagan), increased domestic ebulliences, and increased foreign intervention that the founding fathers correctly warned us was such a bad idea. And no the Demolames aren't better, since Clinton and the DLC took over the Dems they have "triangulated," i.e. copied the Repigs worst moves. Most people think that it's under the Clinton error that the NSA expanded at the most rapid rates, and far from having a few next boxes they most likely had a Danny Hilis connection machine by the early 90s. Hint connection machine equal tens of thousands of processors in a massively parallel configuration:
"Thinking Machines sold seven CM-1s, but only because DARPA brokered and subsidized most of the deals. If the company was going to stay in business, it would need a machine that could pull its weight outside AI research. Unfortunately, according to Resnikov, the decision to tailor the CM-1 to the AI "nonmarket" cost Thinking Machines three years in the real-world marketplace.
In April 1986, Thinking Machines announced the arrival of the CM-2, a machine the scientific community actually could use. The CM-2 was able to run FORTRAN and to do floating-point operations. It was also a piece of work artistically: a five-foot cube of cubes -- done up in what Thinking Machines employees called "Darth Vader black" -- in whose innards red lights flickered mysteriously. But the machine's exotic massively parallel technology still needed special software, which meant its users had to learn new programming techniques. The CM-2 might be more like the human brain than a sequential computer like the Cray was, but scientists knew how to write programs for the Cray. Many of Thinking Machines' first customers, says Dave Waltz, who ran the company's AI group, did most of their computing on the floating-point processors, ignoring the 64,000 single-bit processors."
Wow what an articulatge response to israel's war crimes of slaughtering innocent civilians and expanding it's territory beyond the green linein violation of multiple U.N. sanctions. With an articulate respose such as that you'd make a good Likud party cabinet member.
Israel isn't aggressive, what a bunch of b.s. the settlements and the apartheid wall are way beyond the 1967 green line border agreed to by the international community. Occupation of the the Israelis territory has very much been an aggressive action from 1948 onwards. People are getting very much sick of the whole thing both victory of Kadima and the victory of Hamas prove majorities in both countries are sick of Israelis aggression against Palestinian territory.
I'd trust the guy with the beard in the pony tail in a second over the BMW guy because he's probably an old school Unix geek who knows what the hell he's doing unlike BMW guy who is all style no substance with his Dilberesque "business speak."
Maybe if Israel didn't build a giant apartheid wall deep into Palestinian territory in flagrant violation of international law, didn't have the IDF shoot Palestinian children with snipers as is documented in Pulitzer prize winning journalist Chris Hedges excellent book, "War is Force that Gives Us Meaning."
Didn't kill Palestinian civilians at 4:1 ratio to Israelis deaths as I documented before. And further didn't have Jewish only roads in the Palestinian territories, THEN maybe Arabs wouldn't be so mad at them. Would we accept whites only roads in the U.S.? I don't think so.
"But many of the checkpoints, fences, military patrols, Jewish-only roads and land expropriations that infuriate and disrupt the lives of ordinary Palestinians are not aimed only at stopping terrorists. Rather, they are part of the presence Israel maintains in the West Bank to sustain the settlements there."
The Israelis have only created their own very serious problem by killing thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians and occupying Palestinian territory in flagrant violation of international law. Arabs are right to be outraged over this just as they outraged over the U.S.'s brutal occupation of Iraq. And no Israel won't get nuked as Israel is the terror state which currently has nuclear weapons, that should be an effective deterrent from Iran's HYPOTHETICAL nuclear weapons.
I will say one good thing about Israel at least they had some sense and elected the moderate Kadima party into power and not the Zionist nut case Likud party that got it's ass kicked, ha.
Only get this, radical Islamists have no army and no nation state unlike the Nazis. And Iran is NO threat to the U.S. only a threat to Israel, and not really even a threat to Israel as Israel most likely has hundreds of nuclear bombs (no one knows for sure as they won't let anyone inspect them, hmmmm sound familiar?) Israel can damn well defend itself with it's nuclear bombs and killing Palestinians at a 4:1 that suicide bombers kill Isralis.
"Today, Israel is the world's sixth most powerful nuclear state, with a stockpile of more than 100 nuclear weapons and with the components and ability to build atomic, neutron and hydrogen bombs. Israel's nuclear program began and still operates under tight secrecy, but in the 1980s a series of revelations showed the crucial role played by foreign suppliers."
Tragic as it was 911 only killed as many people as die from heart attacks every 3 days, week after week, month after month, year after year. You want to stop American's dying? Declare war on McDonald's, or does doing the math require too much brain power for "patriots" and Christian religious nuts?
"Heart attacks kill approximately 460,000 people yearly in the United Sates, according to the National Institutes of Health."
You forgot proud isolationist, if we just minded our own business we would in turn be left alone by other countries. It isn't a left or right thing either both Sweden on the left and Switzerland on the right are examples of the positive benefits of isolationism in foreign policy.
"The problem is not with Israal." Yeah, try telling that to the families of Palestinian children killed by Israelis soldiers:
"Last year alone, 50 children under the age of eight were shot dead or blown up by the Israeli army in Gaza: eight, one of whom was two months old, were slaughtered when a one-tonne bomb was dropped on a block of flats to kill a lone Hamas leader, Sheikh Salah Mustafa Shehada. But Rahman, Huda and Haneen were not "collateral damage" in the assassination of Hamas "terrorists", or caught in crossfire. There was no combat when they were shot. There was nothing more than a single burst of fire, sometimes a single bullet, from an Israeli soldier's gun."
911 in the U.S. was a one off event, frankly I could give a rats ass about all the squabbling that goes on in the middle east itself. All the religious fanatics that live there will fight amongst themselves in perpetuity as far as I can see. Let them fight, all "nation building," and attempts to bring democracy by force do is increase the bloodshed over there for no benefit here.
And since you are most likely a partisan Republican let me put in terms you can understand does Clinton in Somalia ring a bell? What Bush is doing in the middle east is no better than the disaster Clinton undertook in Somalia, think about it.
Lets spend our money at home wisely on things like a sustainable transport infrastructure to deal with the inevitable coming of peak, oil and not on pointless meddling in other countries affairs.
Slashdot Mirror
You said: "Regardless of what someone arbitrarily declares a "living wage" to be does not mean that those people produce enough to justify such a wage."
What a bunch of CRAP. These workers ARE the people cranking out thousands of pairs of shoes that retail for over 100 dollars a pair that makes Nike BILLIONS of dollars and they can't afford to pay those workers FOUR DOLLARS A DAY!!??? Aren't you ashamed to look at yourself in the mirror in the morning after saying such self serving LIES?
Yes far better for a few to have unimaginable luxury so that even MORE people can starve. ASSHOLE!!!!
Although I tend towards anarchism people like you make me wonder if if maybe socialism IS a good idea. The more people we can keep from starving by getting them resources (yes including information leading to self sufficiency) the better. Total self centered greed is neither moral nor admirable, nor even sustainable, for it leads to decadence. Does Rome ring a bell?
So you you are justifying exploiting the fuck out of people because they live in very desperate circumstances? ASSHOLE!!!!!! And you wonder why Latin American countries are electing leftist leaders and saying FUCK YOU to use multinationals exploiting their populations?
Excellent idea, living in non sustainable environments sucks. Now where are we putting these people EXACTLY? Are you volunteering your backyard? I hope you have a big backyard...
If you are stranded on a desert Island with no clean water, no cooking utensils, and say no fish or birds, or animals for protein you'll be hurting even if you have a dual processor notebook, that boots OS X, Windows, and Linux. THAT's my point. Once you are doing a little better and aren't starving, and have a few tools to work with and a community behind you then yes of course information is useful for self sufficiency, but first things first...
I too lived in Oregon in Deadwood between Eugene and Florence about 50 miles from the coast. Where I was there WERE a large number of people living in trailers and shacks. And yes Oregon is more generous than most places with things like many food banks, state provided health insurence (is that still true?), etc. My point is that there are MILLIONS of people in the rural U.S. who could use access to a cheap laptop to further their education.
Sorry if "inland Oregon" offended you, it was the first phrase that popped into my mind and not ment to be a slur (shrug).
Yeah "foreign investment" sure helped those people in Vietnam and Indonesia working at Nike factories for less than 40 dollars a month:
s /nike/faq.html
"By 1997, Nike was shamed into telling its Indonesian contractors to stop asking for exemptions to the minimum wage and to stop paying apprentice wages. But the company still does not require its contractors to pay workers a living wage. In April 1999 when the Indonesian government announced that it was increasing the minimum wage to 231,000 rupiah/month ($26US), Nike for the first time announced that it would raise wages for its Indonesian factory workers higher than the legally required minimum,. Their new wage was a minimum cash wage of 265,000 ($30US) and a bonus package that adds up to 332,000 ($37.50US).
While this is certainly a step forward, the wages are still a far cry from a living wage. An Indonesian wage study released by Global Exchange shows that 332,000 rupiah/month ($37.50US) is needed to cover the basic needs of one person. A living wage, which is a wage that helps cover the needs of a family, not just one worker, would be twice this figure, or 664,000 rupiah/month ($75US).
Moreover, Vietnamese and Chinese workers still get poverty wages. In all three countries, $4 a day would be considered a decent wage. Nike, a company with $8.7 billion in revenue in 1998 that sells its shoes for $150, can well afford to pay its workers such a meager sum.
Moreover, Vietnamese and Chinese workers still get poverty wages. In all three countries, $4 a day would be considered a decent wage. Nike, a company with $8.7 billion in revenue in 1998 that sells its shoes for $150, can well afford to pay its workers such a meager sum."
http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/sweatshop
Yes living expenses are less in third world countries but not THAT much less. Cheap labor conservatives love "foreign investment" when the the prevailing wage in the country being invested in is a slave level of wage. If we are actually concerned with helping people and not exploiting them, we should aim for them becoming self sufficient through education, and micro businesses, not being exploited by first world multinationals. And yes laptops might be PART of that picture, FIRST people need to be healthy through building basic infrastructure like clean water, good agricultural practices, etc. THEN in the long term they can build up educational opportunities so they no longer need to be dependent on foreign aid. But first things first don't put the cart before the horse, and don't look at people as a source of cheap labor to be exploited.
My point is that there are people in the rural U.S. who need educational help as well, and our infrastructure even in these poor areas is better set up to make good use of cheap laptops.
e ction=14&click=1
For example according to: worldhungeryear.org
"Poverty in Rural America: Special Challenges Facing Rural Communities
Rural America comprises over 2052 counties, contains 75% of the nation's land and is home to 17% (49 million) of the US population (USDA Economic Research Service). 11.6% or 2.4 million households experience hunger (Bread for the World 2004 Hunger Report). 3.8% American households have children living with hunger (USDA), while one out of five rural children are reported to live in poverty (Population Reference Bureau). At the same time the rural elderly face escalating rates of poverty. Rural workers have been statistically proven to earn less money and experience higher rates of poverty and unemployment than their metro counterparts. in a food insecure household (USDA), while three out of five rural children are reported to live in poverty (US Census 2000). At the same time the rural elderly face escalating rates of poverty. Rural workers have been statistically proven to earn less money and experience higher rates of poverty and unemployment than their metro counterparts."
http://www.worldhungeryear.org/fslc/ria_070.asp?s
That is serious poverty it's not JUST the third world that needs our help.
According to government figure over 25% of people in West Virginia are NOT even getting a high school education.
Education (Persons 25 and older)
Rural * Urban * Total
Percent not completing high school
1980 48.9 39.5 44.0
1990 38.7 29.9 34.0
2000 28.9 21.3 24.8
Percent completing high school only
1980 34.0 37.1 35.6
1990 36.6 36.6 36.6
2000 40.3 38.7 39.4
Percent completing some college
1980 8.7 11.1 10.0
1990 15.1 18.7 17.0
2000 19.1 22.5 21.0
Percent completing college
1980 8.4 12.3 10.4
1990 9.5 14.8 12.3
2000 11.6 17.6 14.8
Source: http://www.ers.usda.gov/StateFacts/WV.HTM
I'd say these people are far better candidates for a 100 dollar laptop than a sub Saharan Africa village, that needs war pumps, water filters, birth control, basic medicines, and help with agriculture, before they can start even THINKING about cheap lap tops.
I think they can have both in the long term. In the short term you have to be not not starving and suffering from dysentery to get any use from the laptop.
Of course, I'm just saying lets make sure people AREN'T starving FIRST before we start shipping over laptops. I'm also saying there are people right here at home (for those of us posting from the U.S.) who could use this help and probably have better infrastructure to support it than MANY (though not all) places in the third world.
What's Negoponte complaining about? Linux runs well enough on the ipod nano with an 80 mhz processor to play doom:
4 584378958&q=ipod+nano+doom&pl=true
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=403284111
Retail price 150 bucks and you can bet BOTH c=Circuit City and Apple are making healthy markups, I'd be genuinely surprised if the nano costs more than 80 bucks to make.
Actually a consumer Linksys wrt54 G router, street price has a 200 mhz processor and 32 megs of ram,
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRT54G
People starving in Africa don't need laptops, they need basic infrastructure like clean water.
Where this might be useful though is parts of highly impoverished rural America like parts of say Alabama, West Virginia, inland Oregon, etc. These are areas where people are genuinely strapped for cash and a 100 dollar good to go laptop might be genuinely useful, most particularly for kids in school, being portable. Yes the geeks among the rural population might be able to build a better computer cheaper, but lets be realistic that's what maybe 10% of the population?
Don't think there aren't areas in the U.S. that don't look like the 3rd world with shacks, and trailer homes, there are, I've lived there and those people need help too.
As in how 14 year old slash dotters type "first."
Frist
Excellent point Truman's setting up the CIA, NSA, FBI, was a big breaking point in the American republic, ironically enough I just e-mailed that same point to a friend of mine. I guess my point was that the Republicans specifically started a deep slide into a police state mentality in the 80s, but you are right the rot has much earlier origins, origins Eisenhower tried to warn us about in his last speech about the military industrial complex. At this point pinning our hopes on either the Ds, or Rs is just plain futile.
I hate to break it to you but the last small republic Republicans died out with Goldwater in the 70s. Ever since the Reagan (proto neo-con) era the Republicans have represented big governments (deficits increased under Reagan), increased domestic ebulliences, and increased foreign intervention that the founding fathers correctly warned us was such a bad idea. And no the Demolames aren't better, since Clinton and the DLC took over the Dems they have "triangulated," i.e. copied the Repigs worst moves. Most people think that it's under the Clinton error that the NSA expanded at the most rapid rates, and far from having a few next boxes they most likely had a Danny Hilis connection machine by the early 90s. Hint connection machine equal tens of thousands of processors in a massively parallel configuration:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine
"Thinking Machines sold seven CM-1s, but only because DARPA brokered and subsidized most of the deals. If the company was going to stay in business, it would need a machine that could pull its weight outside AI research. Unfortunately, according to Resnikov, the decision to tailor the CM-1 to the AI "nonmarket" cost Thinking Machines three years in the real-world marketplace.
In April 1986, Thinking Machines announced the arrival of the CM-2, a machine the scientific community actually could use. The CM-2 was able to run FORTRAN and to do floating-point operations. It was also a piece of work artistically: a five-foot cube of cubes -- done up in what Thinking Machines employees called "Darth Vader black" -- in whose innards red lights flickered mysteriously. But the machine's exotic massively parallel technology still needed special software, which meant its users had to learn new programming techniques. The CM-2 might be more like the human brain than a sequential computer like the Cray was, but scientists knew how to write programs for the Cray. Many of Thinking Machines' first customers, says Dave Waltz, who ran the company's AI group, did most of their computing on the floating-point processors, ignoring the 64,000 single-bit processors."
http://www.inc.com/magazine/19950915/2622.html
Wow what an articulatge response to israel's war crimes of slaughtering innocent civilians and expanding it's territory beyond the green linein violation of multiple U.N. sanctions. With an articulate respose such as that you'd make a good Likud party cabinet member.
Israel isn't aggressive, what a bunch of b.s. the settlements and the apartheid wall are way beyond the 1967 green line border agreed to by the international community. Occupation of the the Israelis territory has very much been an aggressive action from 1948 onwards. People are getting very much sick of the whole thing both victory of Kadima and the victory of Hamas prove majorities in both countries are sick of Israelis aggression against Palestinian territory.
I'd trust the guy with the beard in the pony tail in a second over the BMW guy because he's probably an old school Unix geek who knows what the hell he's doing unlike BMW guy who is all style no substance with his Dilberesque "business speak."
Maybe if Israel didn't build a giant apartheid wall deep into Palestinian territory in flagrant violation of international law, didn't have the IDF shoot
d =25166
1 0922
Palestinian children with snipers as is documented in Pulitzer prize winning journalist Chris Hedges excellent book, "War is Force that Gives Us Meaning."
http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?i
Didn't kill Palestinian civilians at 4:1 ratio to Israelis deaths as I documented before. And further didn't have Jewish only roads in the Palestinian territories, THEN maybe Arabs wouldn't be so mad at them. Would we accept whites only roads in the U.S.? I don't think so.
"But many of the checkpoints, fences, military patrols, Jewish-only roads and land expropriations that infuriate and disrupt the lives of ordinary Palestinians are not aimed only at stopping terrorists. Rather, they are part of the presence Israel maintains in the West Bank to sustain the settlements there."
http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=
The Israelis have only created their own very serious problem by killing thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians and occupying Palestinian territory in flagrant violation of international law. Arabs are right to be outraged over this just as they outraged over the U.S.'s brutal occupation of Iraq. And no Israel won't get nuked as Israel is the terror state which currently has nuclear weapons, that should be an effective deterrent from Iran's HYPOTHETICAL nuclear weapons.
I will say one good thing about Israel at least they had some sense and elected the moderate Kadima party into power and not the Zionist nut case Likud party that got it's ass kicked, ha.
Only get this, radical Islamists have no army and no nation state unlike the Nazis. And Iran is NO threat to the U.S. only a threat to Israel, and not really even a threat to Israel as Israel most likely has hundreds of nuclear bombs (no one knows for sure as they won't let anyone inspect them, hmmmm sound familiar?) Israel can damn well defend itself with it's nuclear bombs and killing Palestinians at a 4:1 that suicide bombers kill Isralis.
5 02.stm (Palestinians killed by Israelis)
n uke.html
c le/2005/08/01/AR2005080101453.html
e artDiseaseStats.asp
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4294
"Today, Israel is the world's sixth most powerful nuclear state, with a stockpile of more than 100 nuclear weapons and with the components and ability to build atomic, neutron and hydrogen bombs. Israel's nuclear program began and still operates under tight secrecy, but in the 1980s a series of revelations showed the crucial role played by foreign suppliers."
(1996 data more now certainly)
http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/israel/
Meanwhile even pessimists believe that Iran is years away from having any nuclear weapons capability whasoever. Why am I crying for Israel again?
According to this Washington Post article Iran is a DECADE away from having nukes: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
Tragic as it was 911 only killed as many people as die from heart attacks every 3 days, week after week, month after month, year after year. You want to stop American's dying? Declare war on McDonald's, or does doing the math require too much brain power for "patriots" and Christian religious nuts?
"Heart attacks kill approximately 460,000 people yearly in the United Sates, according to the National Institutes of Health."
http://www.saintclares.org/services/CardiacCare/H
You forgot proud isolationist, if we just minded our own business we would in turn be left alone by other countries. It isn't a left or right thing either both Sweden on the left and Switzerland on the right are examples of the positive benefits of isolationism in foreign policy.
"The problem is not with Israal." Yeah, try telling that to the families of Palestinian children killed by Israelis soldiers:
, 00.html
"Last year alone, 50 children under the age of eight were shot dead or blown up by the Israeli army in Gaza: eight, one of whom was two months old, were slaughtered when a one-tonne bomb was dropped on a block of flats to kill a lone Hamas leader, Sheikh Salah Mustafa Shehada. But Rahman, Huda and Haneen were not "collateral damage" in the assassination of Hamas "terrorists", or caught in crossfire. There was no combat when they were shot. There was nothing more than a single burst of fire, sometimes a single bullet, from an Israeli soldier's gun."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1007051
911 in the U.S. was a one off event, frankly I could give a rats ass about all the squabbling that goes on in the middle east itself. All the religious fanatics that live there will fight amongst themselves in perpetuity as far as I can see. Let them fight, all "nation building," and attempts to bring democracy by force do is increase the bloodshed over there for no benefit here.
And since you are most likely a partisan Republican let me put in terms you can understand does Clinton in Somalia ring a bell? What Bush is doing in the middle east is no better than the disaster Clinton undertook in Somalia, think about it.
Lets spend our money at home wisely on things like a sustainable transport infrastructure to deal with the inevitable coming of peak, oil and not on pointless meddling in other countries affairs.